


Poe, ext.

by Ranae



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-31 23:03:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6490849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranae/pseuds/Ranae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe’s cool dude veneer hides a disaster of a human being. Finn’s disaster of a human being veneer hides a pretty put together guy, actually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Concussed

**Author's Note:**

> It started out as a one shot, but I'm going to make it a chapter fic.

Poe winced when the door hissed open, and stepped quickly inside, standing a little taller to try to minimize the amount of corridor light streaming into the room. A second later, the door snapped shut behind him, plunging the room back into darkness. It seemed that Finn had finally remembered to close the blinds.

Poe stripped off his shirt and threw it in the approximate direction of his laundry pile. He’d left his flight suit in his locker, since Finn seemed to be willing enough to overlook the whirlwind of garbage and discarded clothing Poe left in his path, but apparently drew the line at reeking armour shells that had somewhere else they could be. His trousers went next—followed by his shoes. Not his finest moment, but he’d been flying for nearly twenty-four hours straight, so he was inclined to give himself a break. He paused a few times in his fumbling to check that the faint whistle of Finn’s breathing hadn’t altered, though he was half hoping it would.

He didn’t get as much rest as he should, and Poe knew he should just let him sleep. He usually did, when he got home late from a mission, but he’d been away five days longer than he was meant to, so Finn would probably want to know that pieces of him weren’t orbiting Eliy 6.

And sleepy Finn was—well, he was even more enticing than usual, was what he was. Full of bleary bravado and even handsier than usually. That, coupled with how happy he’d probably be to see Poe, whole and alive when he’d been tacitly assumed dead... he’d get an armful of Finn, certainly, maybe even a lapful…perhaps some type of ‘welcome back from the crushing oblivion of assumed death’ kiss. This kiss, being of a romantic and celebratory nature, would plausibly lead to _more,_ which might lead to _even more…_

The pilot shook his head ruefully. It wasn’t as if he was even capable of doing anything about Finn’s strong, stupidly soft hands at the moment. He probably couldn’t get hard for anything less than: Finn on his knees, dark hands spreading Poe’s thighs, teasing eyes hiding whatever ‘stay calm’ mantra was going on in his head, those fucking lips opening--

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Poe hissed, glaring down at his dick. It twitched impudently. _You’re a creep, Poe Dameron. Now, get to bed before he wakes up to you trying to pull your pants off over your shoes while sporting a semi._

He crept over to his bed, skimming his fingers along the frame, and reached up to tug down the sheet (Finn always made his bed when he was away), but, instead of grabbing fabric, his hand found what his tired mind took too long to recognize as a human face. This time delay, which he spent with his fingers stuck in the nostril and mouth of the face, meant that he didn’t jerk back fast enough to avoid the face’s fist when crashed into his own. His own face, that was.

Poe shouted and pitched backwards, feeling his fingers tear out of the face’s assorted orifices. Pain shot through his skull, and the world darkened.

Then, it was abruptly suffused with brilliant light.

“Poe?” Came Finn’s voice, from somewhere in the great white beyond.

The pilot blinked, squinting past the ring in his vision and the flashing red lights, to see… Finn’s dick, or at least the outline of it, in the tiny white underwear he insisted on wearing, at exactly his eye level. He tried to move his head, his gaze, his anything, but the world stopped and spun in on itself, so that all he could see were spiralling visions of Finn’s dick.

“What’s happening?” He whimpered.

“Fuck, Poe, can you hear me? How many fingers am I holding up?”

 “None,” he slurred. He knew because he could feel each of Finn’s ten fingers on his greasy, four-day-stubble cheeks. He opened his eyes warily, and Finn’s frowning face swam into view. “You look worried, buddy. Watcha so worried about?”

“I thought I killed Poe fucking Dameron,” he frowned harder, stroking his thumbs over Poe’s cheek bones.

“Finn, buddy, I’m not dead. But I think my skull might be caved in,” Poe wriggled his eyebrows, and grinned, like he was joking.  He was not, but he felt strangely divorced from the idea that his brain might be leaking out of a hole in the back of his head. It wasn’t, because he wouldn’t have come too so quickly, but the thought of the recovery time, the days grounded, the possibility of side-effec—wait, he might have memory loss. There _was_ something to smile about.

“Shit’s sake,” Finn muttered, “okay, okay we need to go to the medical bay, man. You cracked your head on my bed frame. I told you it needed to be fixed, Poe.”

“S’fine.”

“There is a _puddle_ of blood on the floor.”

“You worried? M’fine. Don’t be worried.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not worried. Who’s worried? Not me,” Finn rambled. He took Poe’s forearms, then seemed to think better of it, and pulled him up by his arm pits.

He was abruptly chest to muscular, bare chest with Finn. Poe was suddenly aware that he smelled like a dead animal and that Finn had lifted him with worryingly arousing ease.

“You need to put on pants,” he blurted, staring down at Finn’s nipples.

“I’ll be fine,” Finn said, wrapping one arm around Poe’s torso and starting for the door. “Stormtroopers aren’t big on privacy.”

 _I can see your dick_ , he wanted to say. _Everyone will see your dick before I do. No, that’s a lie, I’ve totally seen it_. _I’m a mess. A creepy mess._

“Thanks buddy,” he found himself saying instead, as the younger man half dragged him down the corridor.

“Anything for you, Poe,” Finn shook his head, “Especially since I almost killed you. Damn, man, would it have killed you to put the light on? Well no, it would have saved you, actually. I’m a highly trained dangerous soldier, Poe. Don’t fucking grab the faces of dangerous soldiers when they’re sleeping! Actually, don’t do that to anyone. What the hell happened, anyway? You’re four days late, Poe. Four days! You should have just woke me up, someone should have woken me up when you got in! And now, instead of celebrating the safe return of my best friend, the General’s going to throw me in the brig for assaulting her favorite pilot.”

Poe looked up from where he’d been marvelling at his own ability to walk. The distant awareness of just how naked they both were was the only thing driving the tiny part of his brain that had survived the twin lobotomies of exhaustion and his probable concussion, to put one foot in front of the other.

“Thanks buddy,” he said again, because he was pretty overwhelmed by that verbal deluge.

“I’m going to be executed by firing squad, aren’t I?”

“I won’t let them hurt you,” Poe patted his face. This redirect of focus and twist of torso was enough to send him off balance. He face planted into the centre of Finns chest, then sort of down to about his belly button.

“Thanks Poe,” Finn said wryly, pulling him back up to a standing position. Again, he did so with breathtaking (or cock-hardening) ease.

 “You’ve gotten stronger,” the pilot muzzily accused.

“Maybe,” the younger man rolled his shoulders, “I’ve been working in the kitchen a lot. I feel like the fact that you seem like you’re drunk is a bad thing. Were you drunk where you came home?”

“Nah,” he tipped his head onto Finn’s collar bone and tried not to imagine what else he might have been doing in the kitchen, with that pretty, pretty chef he always seemed to be hanging off of.

The medical droids were all a twitter when they arrived, and there were enough other patients, that even in his slightly altered state of consciousness, Poe knew that the whole base would probably have heard some version of this story by the next morning. Jessika might actually asphyxiate laughing this time.

 _You either die young, or live long enough to become a parody of yourself_ , Poe thought. Wasn’t that the quote? He was pretty sure that was pretty close to a quote of some kind.

“I’m fucked,” he told the Medroid attending him. Droids can’t sigh, but the poor thing seemed to very much want to.

Later:

“Finn?” Poe asked, after said friend had laid him in bed, and tucked the sheets around him. His concussion was serious, but not bad enough to warrant an overnight stay in hospital, or him having to stay awake for extended periods of time. Which was good, since he might actually die of exhaustion before a brain bleed, or whatever they were worried about after concussions, got him.

“Yah?”

“Why were you in my bed?”

“I spilled soup in mine—I changed the sheets, but it still smells kind of weird.”

“Okay. I don’t smell anything.”

“Well I do,” Finn blew out a loud sigh. He couldn’t see him, but Poe was pretty sure he was crossing his arms and raising a single eyebrow. He spent too much time with the General. “Poe, you left a whole curl on my bed frame. Like, a curl with meat attached. I mean—well, you fucked your head up pretty bad. Or, I guess I did? Sorry about that. You feeling okay, now?”

“You were naked in my bed,” Poe said mournfully. “And now I have a concussion.”

“It’s been a bad night all around,” Finn agreed. He flicked off the lights and climbed into bed. “Poe?”

“Yah, buddy?”

“I’m not getting a new roommate if you die.”

Poe wasn’t sure what he was meant to say to that, so he just stared at the ceiling, and pretended like maybe he’d already gone to sleep.

Even later:

“So, he fucked you through a wall, huh? How’d that feel?”

“Not now, Pava. Can’t you see our Commander is injured? Sex injured.”

“It wasn’t a sex injury. We’re just friends. Normal friends.”

“Uh huh.”

“Yah, totally. Everyone believes you.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm not gonna lie, its a bit weird. Like, one long conversation. Also, an OC, because I thought Finn needed friends. But its pretty funny. I think, anyway.

Finn woke over warm and uncomfortable. He grunted, twisting in the sheets to free his arms and knock the rest of the offending bed clothes onto the floor.

He lay with his eyes closed in the predawn quiet, listening to Poe’s snores from across the room. The pilot wouldn’t wake for another few hours. Of all the squadrons, Rapier seemed to have the laxest schedule. Probably because they were hardly on base enough to really enjoy it. And because there were so few of them. Fewer every mission.

He jolted up in bed, stifling a gasp.

No point in thinking about that now.

He stood, and silently remade his bed with sharp, soldier’s corners. On his way to the fresher, he nudged Poe’s floor clothes into the corner with his foot. Every once in a while, Poe would come back to their room in the evening and abruptly notice the decidedly rancid state of it. And how much of it was his fault. He would go all apologetic, and give the place an even more thorough scrub down than Finn ever did.

Two days later, it would be the same catastrophe it always was, but honestly, Finn didn’t really care. He kind of liked the mess, and all the excess of random, pointless crap Poe just seemed to _own_ : the star charts and posters on the wall, stacks of old holonovels and poorly constructed model fighter planes. It made their quarters seem homey, the kind of place two people might live in for long periods of time without either of them dying a tragic, if not particularly untimely, death. Maybe Finn would be messy too, when he eventually got ‘stuff’.

He finished his morning abolitions, dressed and slipped out the door. The hallways were empty this early in the morning, so he whistled under his breath to keep himself company. The few people he passed were the same ones he passed everyday: guards on sentry duties, the swing shift of nurses and a few hazy eyed technicians. He greeted them in a muffled undertone, because being forced from bed before the sun rose seemed to leave most people on base fragile, and liable to startle if he used his normal voice.

He was actively trying not to startle anyone, or generally be off putting. He’d spent the last three months in a state of near perpetual embarrassment. Okay, maybe not perpetual, but at least once a day he was forced to cover an awkward pause in conversation with a slightly off topic anecdote, usually about the weather. Poe told him it was sweet, he told himself he needed to be better.

_/“So, what do your parents do?”_

_“I’m not really sure.”_

_“Oh yah, I—I guess you didn’t really… huh...”_

_“…So, how about that wind storm two weeks ago? Crazy, right? All that wind. Blowing things around.”/_

He seemed to know almost every person he passed in the halls, even if he might not know their language, and most of the people he didn’t know seemed to know him, because they said hello anyway. He always said it back, just in case they actually did know each other, and he’d just forgotten. He’d been on some pretty powerful painkillers for the first few weeks.

Poe said he knew so many people because he worked too much, and that might be true. Apparently, in the Resistance, it was not the norm to work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Of course, it wasn’t the norm in the First Order, either. Whatever numerous and horrific failings they had had, they understood that their soldiers were human, and that they needed adequate rest to function at peak capacity. But it was possible that Finn let a few people (Poe) think that, so that they wouldn’t ride him so hard about working all the time.

When he reached the kitchen, the wide wooden doors were locked. They were the only doors on base that didn’t open on their own accord: a remnant of the settlement that had been there before the Resistance had come to this planet.

“Come on,” he grumbled, beating a tattoo against them with both hands. Every morning, he arrived at the same time, and every morning they were locked. He’d given up asking for a key.

There was faint click, then the doors were abruptly pulled in. He stumbled through, barely managing to keep his feet.

“Morning,” Finn said cheerfully, and shut the door behind him.

“Good morning,” Chiso, the kitchen boss, replied and bustled back to where a cauldron of beans was bubbling on the stove. “Savoy managed to pick up some eggs last night, gods know how. Get them cracked.”

She wasn’t fragile in the mornings, his boss. Next to Poe, she was probably his best friend on the base, though he couldn’t have said what Chiso thought he was. Some kind of bonded servant, probably.

She was tall, dark skinned like him and kept her hair in hundreds of tiny braids. She looked young, but he was sure she was older than him, maybe even older than Poe.

The kitchen was—well, it was shit. There were two stoves, with three working elements between them, and a couple of microwaves. One wall was a giant bread oven, that they made as much use of as the possibly could, though most of what they served was freeze dried mush reminiscent of the nutrient paste they’d fed him in the First Order, supplemented with vegetables from the garden behind the base, or stolen from Force knew where. There was occasionally meat, again usually stolen and less than palatable—but sometimes fresh. Chiso went shifty when he asked about it, so he figured where ever it came from, she was the author of its demise.

He walked back to the walk in refrigerator, enjoying the breath of cold when he opened the door. Grabbing the tray of duck eggs, he peeked at the stacked trays of bread on his way back the galley. The loaves had risen perfectly during the night.

He cracked Letarian duck eggs into a massive steel bowl, humming under his breath. Chiso scowled at him, flicking her braids over her shoulders, which was a sign that she had moved past her default vaguely irritated setting, and that he was in danger of losing an appendage. But he kept on humming, since she didn’t seem to be in a talking mood and he needed something to keep him company. She might even forget how much she hated fun and start humming along with him. She never had, but it was still technically possible.

“What are you doing today?” She asked, so abruptly he cracked an egg clean in half on the edge of the bowl.

Shards of shell dispersed through the thirty or so already cracked eggs like shrapnel through an unarmoured stomach. The half of the egg which had not made it into the bowl oozed over the counter and down onto the floor. Finn surveyed the wreckage, “cleaning up egg, I guess. After breakfast it’s hand-to-hand, then I’m running drills with the infantry guys. Back here for the dinner service, then out with the pilots.”

When he looked up, she had abandoned the beans and turned to look at him. That was never a good sign. She nodded, not smirking too much as he poked at the largest of the shell fragments. Months of hard experience had taught him that simply trying to pinch it up and away was not something he was capable of.

“You’re on napkins tonight,” Chiso told him. “No complaints—the stain still hasn’t come out of the general’s dress uniform. And we’re running out of fresh vegetables. I want you to take some of your little friends and gather mushrooms from the forest before the whole base gets scurvy. Take the children, too. They miss you.”

“Gather mushrooms? With a bunch of little kids? Yah, that’ll be an easy sell. Who doesn’t want to spend their off time in the woods, looking for fungus and chasing run away five year olds,” he muttered sardonically.

“Tell them it’ll be a fun adventure.” She narrowed her eyes at him, “look sad when you do it.”

“I’m not—I’m not their pet Kabba,” he would have waved his hands at her defiantly, but they were in egg goo. “I can’t just whine at them until they help us. Are you coming?”

Her face went carefully blank, “I’m busy.”

“Really.”

“Hmm,” she said authoritatively, smirk hovering at the corners of her mouth, threatening to become a smile. “Your boy came back, didn’t he?”

“My what?” he squeaked. Not liking where this conversation was going, he wiped his hands and turned to face her, leaning back against the wooden work surface. It groaned ominously; one more thing that needed fixing.

“That boy. You know, the one that wants you?”

“I’m sorry, the one that _what_?”

“The one that watches your ass like it’s a holonovel?”

Finn was reduced to sputtering. Of course, he knew of the ‘boy’ to which she was referring. She never used his name—never used anyone’s name, for whatever insane reason. He’d only learned hers after almost a month of working in the kitchen when he’d had to sign for a delivery of nutrient mush in her name. It was all:

_/“You know, the fat one.”_

_“Snap?”_

_“Maybe. Is he fat?”_

_“…I guess?”/_

“If you mean Poe, my platonic roommate friend, then yah, he came back two nights ago. I almost killed him. It was a whole… thing,” Finn muttered. He turned back to his eggs, cracking the last of them into the bowl. The bright violet yolks reminded him of field of flowers—they were a bright bowl of potential, unrealized. But, admittedly, delicious.

“I heard. I heard you walked naked together through the base. Everyone thinks you’re fucking him.”

“I’m not!” Finn whisked the eggs violently, breaking them into a lavender mass. Everyone thought they were fucking, apparently, and they had evidentially decided who wanted to keep it a secret. Finn’d been on the receiving end of more sympathetic looks in the past few days that the entire time he’d been slathered in bacta.

“In my culture, when a woman wants to make a man her husband, she gives him something, some raw material, like wood, or fish, or a circuit board, in the hope that he will make her something with it,” She said, stirring the beans. “It has to be something that she expects to get from him in the marriage. In the old days, women would give grain, and get bread back after the harvest, but now it can be anything, anything that proves that he’s capable of reciprocating something in the relationship.”

“Okay,” Finn drew the word out, raising his eyebrows. Somehow, he found he’d turned back to her, pulled in like a magnet by her particular brand of crazy. He liked it, most of the time, not in the least because it made him feel sane in comparison.

“So.” She paused, giving him an expectant look. “So, what could he give you?”

“Why are we jumping all the way to marriage, here?” Finn protested, his voice feeble even in his own ears. “And why am I the girl?”

“It can go the other way. Besides, then the man or, you know, whoever, has to give the woman something, and she makes him the final gift. So, what could that boy give you?”

“I’m not sure this is the best way to go about this…” Finn frowned, foreboding settling into his chest like heart burn.

 “Can he cook?” She pressed on, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “That’s the most traditional route.”

_/Poe handed him a lumpy, hastily wrapped bundle. Finn peeled back the layers, trying to hold back a flinch when his worst fears were confirmed. He lifted the sandwich, weighing it in the palm of his hand, ever muscle in his body screaming for him to throw it into the river. The meat—it appeared to be poultry, but he had trust issues when it came to Poe’s sandwiches—looked like it might have been hacked apart using BB-8’s power saw attachment and then cooked with it’s butane torch. He rotated the sandwich so that it was held between his fingers, but as soon as it lost the support of his palm, it disintegrated like a sandcastle in a typhoon, bits of filling raining down on his chest and lap._

_After a short, firming breath, he took a bite. It tasted so unlike food that Finn was left to wonder if his ‘buddy’ might not be a First Order plant playing some kind of long mind game to slowly drive him insane, using only bread, meat, and whatever the fuck kind of death-chemical Poe had slathered on this._

_“Mmm,” he said, when Poe’s shining eyes looked at him in askance. “It’s—It’s delicious.”_

_“I’m glad you like it, I don’t eat meat so I’m never sure if I’ve cooked it alright. I put it in the microwave for like, ten minutes.”_

_“No, no, it’s great. So great.”_ /

“Nope,” Finn shook his head vigorously. A part of him wanted to defend his friend, but telling someone felt like shedding his combat pack after a day of sprinting around under Phasma’s direction. Or, actually, it felt more like shoving Phasma down a trash compactor. Not that he wanted to shove Poe in a trash compactor. Maybe just his sandwiches.

“Hmm. Well, we can’t raise livestock here, but could he hunt for you?”

/ _Poe feeding a tiny blue bird bits of cut up worm with a pair of tweezers he stole from Jessika, his eyes going all soulful and red after they’d found the little creature stiff at the bottom of it’s makeshift cage_./

“I don’t think that would work. He doesn’t even eat meat.”

“ _He doesn’t eat meat_. Of course he doesn’t. What a fine man you’ve found for yourself, Finn,” she shook her head, radiating disgusted pity, like he’d just admitted that Poe was a drug addict, “This is why he’s always cold, you know. What about growing food, gardening?”

_/The tiny orange cactus that Finn had been given by a botanical engineer he’d befriended—who had assured him that it was capable of surviving anything from a forest fire to a nuclear explosion—had become a sad, round little husk after just a week under Poe’s care./_

“Also no,” Finn winced. That poor cactus.

 “Good Lord. Does he clean, at least?” She asked.

“Is cleaning a talent? How does that provide for me?” he resisted the urge to throw-up his hands in a vain attempt to maintain at least a modicum of normalcy, though this seemed like the kind of conversation that was bound to end in wild gesticulation. “I mean, I guess he could be a maid or something. What would I get him, a bottle of bleach? Because that could be pretty easily misinterpreted.”

“It’s something he could do for you, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“So, does he?”

_/Poe’s dirty clothes slowly forming an even carpet of their entire quarters, while Finn’s fit neatly in a single wicker basket._

_-_

_Poe, dropping a pile of unfolded, slightly damp clean laundry on his bed, then proceeding to sleep on it for the next week, slowly incorporating it into the larger nest of old socks, squashed star charts, data pads, and various electrical cords that made up his bed clothes._

_-_

_Finding the cavernous, moldering remains of what appeared to be a thorpberry pie with all the filling eaten out of it under Poe’s bed, the sell-by-date sticker indicating that it’d probably been under there for over a year._

_-_

_His general untidiness: the man just seemed to just accumulate dirt—his nails, which Finn watched him clean every night, were nonetheless always dirty, every shirt he owned was either stained or ripped (Finn was sure the only article of clothing he’d ever managed not to destroy was The Jacket), and he seemed to actually sweat engine grease. He may or may not have had a very haunting dream about Poe turning into an X-Wing by the light of D’Qar’s five moons./_

“Not really?” He crossed the kitchen, “Shouldn’t we do the bread?”

“Go get the starter,” she made a shooing motion with her hands. He rolled his eyes, and walked into the back. The starter was a bubbling cauldron of yeast culture that he fed twice a day with fruit peels and sugar. It’s name was Martha, and, other than the now deceased bird Poe brought home, it (she?) was the closest thing to a pet he’d ever had. She didn’t do much other than bubble occasionally, but he was more attached to her than a person should be to what amounted to a bucket of grey bacteria sludge. He ladled out enough for the morning’s batch, patting the bowl reassuringly as he did.

When he returned to the main kitchen, Chiso had already pulled out the other ingredients. They were making bread to be served at dinner, since it needed to rise for a few hours before it was baked. They could have just made the flat bread every other resistance base he’d been to served, and sometimes they did, when the supply lines got tangled or dried up all together, but the bread they made seemed to be a point of pride for the base. And for Chiso, probably. She wasn’t a soldier, or an engineer, but the one thing she could give, she gave tirelessly.

They moved silently together for a few moments. It was easy to get lost in the rhythm of bread making; they’d done it together every day since the first morning he’d been capable of doing more than stumbling to physio and back. At first, she’d muttered correction of his every move, but gradually she spoke less and less, until they were seamless and utterly silent.

“What about electronics?” She said suddenly, and he jumped half out of his skin, spilling flour over the counter, “He’s always bent over his X-Wing, doing something other than showing off his fine ass, I assume.”

/ _Snap, hunching his large frame over an open access port in what approximated BB-8’s head, said, without looking up, “Finn, hand me the spanner, will you?”_

_“This one?”_

_“Yep, thanks. Ugh, this is going take a while. Fiddly stuff always does. Would you mind skipping dinner?”_

_“I can’t, Chiso will kill me. Maybe I could get Poe to come help you? BB-8’s his droid, anyway.”_

_BB-8 whistled with what could only be described as horror._

_“Yah, that’s not a great idea.”_

_“Why not?”_

_Snap turned to look him full in the face, expression wry, “I don’t know if you noticed, but if it can’t fly, our boy’s a menace to it. Poe once tried to fix BB-8’s charging port, and ended up making it forget every Standard word beginning with the letter ‘M’.”_

_“What the fuck?”_

_“I don’t even know, man.”_

_-_

_Poe, standing next to a sparking microwave, “I guess these are the ones you can’t put metal in, huh?”/_

Finn sheepishly avoided her eyes, pulling the finished dough out of the bowl, and separating it into reasonably even masses for kneading. They did have a machine, but he liked to do it himself. It was good for his back, maybe.

“No again, eh?” Chiso said, her tone probably as close to sympathetic as he was going to get, “Good with children?”

_/Poe throwing up, partially on the baby, the first time he’d ever tried to change a diaper./_

“Well, he’s not a danger to them…”

She raised her eyebrows, “I hear they’re a danger to him, though. Egylp told me about the time Poe ‘helped out’ in the crèche. Didn’t he start crying?”

“He did not!” Finn protested, still kneading, “I pulled the twins off before they could do any damage. He just needs to learn how to say ‘no’ to them. And, ‘don’t bite off my ear’.”

“I know you care about him, but how can you expect to live with a boy who can’t do anything for you? Or for himself, for that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter, we eat in the mess, and our laundry is done by the cleaners,” Finn muttered. He poked broodily at the lump coalescing before him. It seemed off today, though he might have just been projecting. He shook his head, put a cloth over it and pushed it aside to rise, before taking up the next bit.

“And what if you crash on an uninhabited planet? Will you hunt the food _and_ cook it? You’ll have to build the shelter, too—I’ve seen the table he built in your quarters, it’s about as stable as Admiral Akbar’s marriage. _And_ you’ll have to do all the cleaning,” She said, exasperated. He couldn’t help but notice she had given up even the illusion of helping him, and focused all of her energy on judging his life choices. Or lack thereof.

“I think I could probably teach him to keep our hovel tidy,” he muttered tetchily.

“Is there anything that this boy is good at? _Anything_? Linear algebra? Flower arranging? Masonry? Can he speed read or something? At least then he could summarize reports for you.”

Finn blinked, “Ugh…He can fly anything?”

“So what?” She snapped, gesturing sharply, “What does that do for you?”

“He could fly me somewhere? Save me from the First Order?” Finn said, making a face. That was more than enough, in his opinion. He glanced at the clock: they were behind: the bread for this morning, which had been made and set to rest last night needed to be put in the oven. He put the second lump aside to rest and went to the walk-in refrigerator to get the trays.

“Being able to protect your spouse from bodily harm is assumed! Come on, he must have some type of talent. Think harder.” Chiso implored, voice rising so that he could hear her in the back, “Maybe he’s a landscape painter? Can he peel fruit in interesting ways?”

“He’s really good at doing his hair?” he called back.

“You have about a centimetre of highly immobile hair. Well, I suppose he is very pretty, even if he is basically useless.”

“He’s the best pilot in the Resistance!” Finn snapped, slamming the trays down in front of her, a bit harder than he meant to. She didn’t even twitch.

“Which makes him even less useful to you! Pilots have the shortest life expectancies of any soldiers in the Resistance. Also, he’s at least ten years older than you,” she raised her eyebrows, “That boy is starting to go grey. Why could you _possibly_ want him?”

“He makes me happy,” he threw over his shoulder on the way back to the walk-in, where he grabbed the rest of the stacked trays. They needed some type of rolling shelf or something, it was fine for him, but Chiso hadn’t been trained from childhood to carry heavy objects. It was part of the reason he never took a day o—wait, what the fuck did he just say. He stopped, halfway between the kitchen and the counter and stared through a gap in the trays at Chiso with wide eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she rolled her eyes. He rolled his back, and set the trays down. Poe did make him happy. And saying it aloud was perfectly fine. Yes.

“I’m not being ridiculous,” he said, trying not to sound like he was convincing himself, “I can do everything, I mean basically everything that I need-- other than maybe perform surgery on myself-- for myself. All-- uh, all I need is someone to make me happy,” he sighed and visibly gave up, “Okay, actually, I’m just listening to that back, and it does sound pretty stupid.”

Chiso waffled her head back and forth, not looking up from where she was re-arranging the rolls on the baking tray. Carefully, she ran a sharp knife over the tops, then stepped back so that he could pick up the tray and take it to the oven. He did so without being asked, just as he had done every morning since he’d been allowed to do more than bring her ingredients and watch.

The door to the oven opened more easily each day, but he still had to put enough muscle behind it to wonder how Chiso had managed this before he showed up. He walked back to the main kitchen area, where, instead of already having the next tray ready, she was watching him with crossed arms and an inscrutable expression.

She sighed, and rubbed her eyes, “you know, we’ll probably all die fairly soon. For all his deficiencies, he seems otherwise decent. He doesn’t seem like he would beat you. He’s physically healthy. And virile, if his facial hair is anything to go by.”

“…Yah, I don’t think he’d beat me, either. Thanks for that. And what does virility have to do with—you know what, never mind, I’m just going to tell him how I feel,” Finn nodded to himself, “yah, I’ll just, you know, sit him down and say—“

“Let’s fuck?”

“--Will you stop saying shit like that!” He hissed, shuddering. “Ugh, who am I kidding? I’m just not going to say anything and stare pathetically at him for the rest of my life. He’s my best friend on the base, I can’t screw that up! I mean, say he does, you know… _If_ he likes me—“

“He does.”

“—then why hasn’t he said anything? He does crazy stuff all the time! Like, life endingly crazy. He just jumps into things. Why hasn’t he jumped into—nope, nope, not what I meant,” Finn shook his head. He wasn’t exactly opposed to—no, it still didn’t sound right. It was the _into_ that was killing this. Not that he had a problem with things going into… other things, but--

“Because he realizes how old and useless he is, while you’re young, and very useful,” She said, snapping him out of his frankly unsettling train of thought, “or he thinks you’re still in love with that skinny white girl.”

“Rey. Her name is Rey, and I know you know that. And there is still nothing wrong with Poe. He’s not old, okay, thirty-three is not old,” He said. Because it wasn’t. Not really, anyway. There were older people. He would be the oldest person Finn had ever slept with, though. If that ever happened.

“There’s no sense in wearing rose coloured glasses about this.”

“I’m not. Seriously. If we were stuck on a planet together— I wouldn’t even trust him to pick berries. He’d poison us immediately. But I know he’d tell me about some other time he’d been stuck on a planet with the three other coolest people in the galaxy. He’d patch me up if I was injured. And he’d refuse to let me use any of the medkit supplies on him—he always does that, we’re not so low on medication that he can’t take a few pain killers when he’s got a migraine at three in the morning, the idiot. He’d sleep on the side of the hovel that had a leaky roof and say he liked the breeze. He’d—“

He’d just be there, which was more than enough for Finn. He’d burn down half the planet trying to start a cook fire. He’d try to lie about it, try to act natural, like maybe the planet had just combusted on it’s own, but Finn would know because Poe’s lips got all twisted up when he lied and he became incapable of forming sentences longer than three words.

Poe would grow a beard there, too. They wouldn’t even need to be marooned long, Poe’s four o’clock shadow usually grew in by noon, so he’d be half-way to wolf-man with in about a week. _Poe with a beard_. He’d do the dishes for the rest of their lives if he could have a bearded Poe to himself for a week.

When he blinked himself out of his reverie, Chiso was watching him with a wry expression on her face, “Alright. You love him. I get it. Do you still have the honey he bought you?”

“Lots. I don’t really like it, actually. Why?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

When he looked at her, she looked earnest—not a single shadow in her eyes, for the first time in their entire acquaintance. So he nodded.

“Alright.”

=-=-=-=

“Hey Poe, I’ve got the afternoon off, you wanna—“

“Sure.”

“—gather mushrooms with the children.”

Poe went a bit white, but said, “yah, yah whatever you want, buddy. Sounds good.”

Finn blinked. He hadn’t even had to break out the bit about people’s teeth falling out.

 Poe really did love him.

He could probably just lure him into the forest and—huh, he was pretty sure that exact scenario had been in the sexual harassment pamphlet he’d been given when he officially joined the Rebellion. Anyway, he was going to do this right. Or, at least, traditionally.


End file.
